European Cinema Research Forum

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS EUROPEAN CINEMA?

University of Exeter

2-4 July 2010 

A decade into the establishment of the European Cinema Research Forum, this conference aims to establish where exactly the ‘Europeanness’ of European Cinema may lie. Catherine Fowler argues in her introduction to The European Cinema Reader that ‘we could almost say that without critics […] there would be no ‘European Cinemas’ (p. 1). This suggests that outside of the critical field there is no ‘European Cinema.’ Like the notion of Europe, that of European Cinema must refer to a space which relies on discourse to create its identity, to decide which nations and which films should be included. The idea of a pan-European film industry producing, distributing and exhibiting films with Europe has rarely been realised in any sustained way (despite various policy initiatives). Bringing together the various critical, theoretical and historical discourses of the European cinema, this conference asks us to investigate our own critical investment in the creation of European cinema, what is at stake institutionally, aesthetically and critically in this creation, and what purposes it may serve.

This interrogation can take place in  a variety of ways, and questions the conference aims to address include:

• Is European Cinema still associated with Art Cinema, as identified by David Bordwell and Steve Neale in the late 1970s-early 1980s?

• Can directors who happen to have been born or who happen to work within Europe be identified as European ‘auteurs’?

• Is there such a thing as a European cinematic sensibility?

•  Does European cinema have its own spatiality? What are the differences between a ‘European’ treatment of location and a ‘non-European treatment’?

• What roles do institutional support and funding arrangements, such as film festivals or the E.U.  Media Mundus programme, play?

• How might we take account of the role of audiences within Europe and their relation to European film culture?  Is there anything specifically ‘European’ about films produced in Europe that also belong to such contemporary transnational cinematic movements as New Queer cinema or post-feminist cinema?

This conference aims to complement current work comparing European Cinema to other ‘World’ cinemas and Hollywood cinemas by examining European cinema from within, asking what it means to watch, produce and analyse films within Europe and what political, ideological and cultural issues may be at stake in this activity.

We invite proposals for papers that address some or any of the above questions, as well as those that challenge these issues and/or terminologies.

Though the focus of this conference is Europe and European cinema encourage submissions that illustrate how alternative cinematic imaginaries interact with(in)  Europe or even the way that European cinematic imaginaries are themselves disrupted in other contexts.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• Authorship
• Place and Space
• Film festivals
• Stardom
• Film policy
• Transnational and post-national cinema
• Gender, feminism and post-feminism
• Emigration and immigration
• Borders and margins

Proposals for individual papers should be addressed by email, by  28 February 2010 to

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Proposals for the gender, feminism and post feminism strand should be addressed by email to

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